Re: Brantley blog post

["adam hodgkin" <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>]

Peter Brantley's piece is indeed interesting, and I wonder why it 
did not appear among his normal and distinguished postings on 
O'Reilly Radar. Joe's phrase may be a misrepresentation of 
Brantley's concern. Its not so much that a 
Google/Publisher/Author settlement may amount to "Google will 
sell out the libraries". The real issue here is the public 
interest in Open Access for which libraries, librarians, are 
generally, or often, but not always the most reliable advocate. 
It is very noticeable that there is a growing concern in the 
library community that some libraries may have missed their 
calling by aligning too much of their efforts and their long term 
mission with Google's digitisation projects.

Its also important that some very serious publishers are showing 
a very proper concern with the benefits of an information 
commons, a larger and freer commons, with Open Access, with 
reusable and repurposable content etc. In the end authors and 
publishers, scholarship and creative literature will be the 
losers if a Google Book Search settlement leads to bureaucratic 
and overly institutional restrictions on the reuse of digital 
text. I will be very surprised if the case is settled by the 
parties agreeing to a new type of collective licensing 
arrangement for orphan copyrights, a Google funded collective 
payments system that monitors and obscures a lot of literature in 
libraries (this is I suspect what worries Brantley). But if that 
is the way things go, the libraries, especially Google's 
partners, will surely join in the "sell out".

Adam

On Jan 4, 2008 12:08 AM, Joseph J. Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:

> Peter Brantley has a long post on his "Shimenawa" blog (he has
> more than one).  It can be found here:
>
> http://blogs.lib.berkeley.edu/shimenawa.php/2008/01/02/trade_for_our_own_account
>
> The post is hard to summarize, as it ranges across a number of 
> challenging policy issues, but the gist of it is that the 
> current mass digitization projects in many libraries are not 
> moving forward in the libraries' own interests, but, rather, in 
> the interests of the parties (largely commercial and 
> principally Google) who step up to the initial costs.  There is 
> also speculation here about the much-whispered-about 
> possibility that "Google will sell out the libraries" (my 
> phrase, not Peter's) in cutting a deal with the publishers and 
> authors with whom they are now in litigation.
>
> Joe Esposito